The Woman Who Killed My Mother

By Erin Belieu

The woman who killed my mother 

lives in Ocala, Florida. 

Not far to drive. 

So simple to find. 

The internet shows me 

she keeps a concrete goose 

on her porch 

which she’s presently dressed 

for Halloween, 

& she posts many pictures 

of a small, rheumy-eyed dog.

It looks like it won’t last long. 

The woman who killed my mother 

is a nurse, & her name 

is Beverly. 

Like Beverly,

I too have been hasty & uncareful; 

signed any number of forms

without reading closely, 

misplaced faith

in routine procedure.

When the woman who killed my mother

was killing her, 

a death more intent 

was killing a million more. 

We weren’t allowed at the hospital, 

couldn’t stand before her body,

as children do. 

Just my brother, days later, 

holding his phone

to the crematory’s viewing window 

so I could watch too. 

I often tell my students, 

it takes narrative discipline 

not to describe our dead. 

But there she is... 

& a cheap blanket

beneath the body on the gurney—

so...unprepared—

to make its disposal easier.

Looking through the phone

through the window

at my no-longer-mother, 

I thought of my favorite poet 

who writes of staring into 

his mother’s coffin, 

...how many lifetimes there are

in the sweet revisions of memory...

and what grace might come 

from believing this.

   

Child-size, & always 

agreeably plump, 

my mother was— 

like Beverly, I think—

a sentimental sort at heart. 

Quick to delight, bruised easily

by the slightest offsides touch; 

who smiled eagerly 

& raged like an uncontained flame 

when hurt; 

born with a hair-trigger softness 

I pretend I’ve never possessed. 

Beverly, when killing my mother,

it must have been awful—

her suddenly coding; you realizing 

you got the anesthesia wrong. 

The doctor in earshot

screaming down the phone at me

WHAT DO YOU WANT? 

DO WE RESUSCITATE?

My favorite poet says,

When mother died 

I thought: now I’ll have a death poem.

That was unforgiveable... 

Beverly, between us, 

you’ve left nothing 

more to do.

You have never asked,

& how unspeakable—

to ever forgive you.

(With lines from Stephen Dunn’s “The Routine Things Around the House”)

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